Common treatments for cancer include removal of cancerous tumor tissue from the patient, radiation treatment, chemotherapy, or ablation interventions, but the most effective treatment or combinations of treatments typically varies from patient to patient. For example, not all cancer patients respond to certain treatments like chemotherapy and radiation treatment, and furthermore not all responsive cancer patients have equal success with these treatments. The success of a treatment for a patient is often not known until the end of the treatment or after a follow-up period after the treatment. However, it is advantageous to be able to accurately predict whether a patient will respond well to a treatment, particularly earlier in the treatment plan, to guide implementation of alternative regimens and/or to abort an unsuccessful treatment plan. Accurate and frequent evaluation of a tumor's response to treatment allows a physician to optimize the treatment plan for the patient, and potentially spare an unresponsive patient from unnecessary side effects from the treatment, such as the physical and emotional toll of chemotherapy-induced side effects. Monitoring the state of tumor tissue in a patient could theoretically be performed with repeated use of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) or positron emission tomography (PET). However, these technologies are costly and may not be accessible in a community for repeated use, making them ill-suited for frequent evaluation of tumor tissue. Other technologies, such as X-rays, utilize ionizing radiation that precludes frequent use. Thus, there is a need in the medical field to create an improved method of characterizing the pathological response of tissue to a treatment plan. This invention provides such an improved method.